Imagine if there were an organ in your body that weighed as much as your brain, that affected your health, your weight, and even your behavior. Wouldn’t you want to know more about it? There is such an organ — the collection of microbes in and on your body, your human microbiome.

Reviews

BF

Both enjoyable and challenging. Hear an interesting range of lectures, backed up with a wide range of articles. Shook up my idea of what it takes to be a healthy human - a healthy microbiome.

MH

May 09, 2020

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

One of the best courses I've ever taken online. The food log assignments - reflections & final project are immensely beneficial. If you're curious about your microbes, don't miss this course.

From the lesson

The Human Gut Microbiome and Your Health

Now that we've given you some background about the methods we use to analyze microbial data, it's time for us to talk more about recent discoveries in microbiome research. This module will focus on the main factors impacting the gut microbiota as well as the influence of the gut microbiota on nutrition and gut health. This is the fun part, so get excited!

Taught By

Rob Knight

Dr. Jessica L. Metcalf

Dr. Katherine R. Amato

Transcript

The human food project, the idea behind that was to figure out a way to blur the line between, science and the public's understanding of that science. So basically it's a, it's a transitional idea in that. So you take complex microbiology discussions and you say, you try to create a take home message. Sometimes there's not a take home message, and there's usually not. But if there is, there are little bits of nuggets there, that people can possibly operationalize in their own life. And at the end of the day, it's not that you should eat this or eat that, so that you have this gut microbiota. It's basically get, get people hooked at some level, so they start paying attention. The human food project, one of, one of the other reasons I started the human food project was as, as I started looking into microbiology, I come from an anthropological background, one of the things that was missing was, all the cohorts who were used in studies were Western populations, people with too many antibiotics, too much tequila, too much marijuana. And, as an anthropologist, I knew there were ancestral populations around the world, and they were disappearing. So I thought the contribution I could make would be to, to seek out some of these populations, and possibly capture their microbiome before it's lost to the, kind of the buzz saw of globalization. So, so the idea that we should be, I mean a lot of people have the idea, but it's very difficult to do the field work. So that was kind of one of my reasons for starting all these a few years ago was to try and figure out if I can make that contribution by finding these groups, getting the samples and then contributing those samples to the larger discussion. Right now I'm sitting in, in Hadza land, I'm sitting in Tanzania in Eastern Africa, where the Hadzabe live. And the Hadzabe are one of the last, if not the last remaining hunter-gatherer group in all all of Africa. And what makes them extra special is, they live in an area today, where humans have spent millions of years evolving. And so, they literally hunt the same animals minus the mega fauna, that humans have met, hunted for millions of years. They gather the same plants, they're covered in the same soil, and they drink the same water. Even though they wear T-shirts and they have metal knives now, they still live in that ancestral microbial community and they're exposed to it on a daily basis. So that makes them unique and different than lets say a population in South America, different water, different animals, different plants. And so, but it's a very small window, so we'll be out here for a few years working with the Hadza. Working with the Hadza for the last year, the, the thing that has had the greatest impact on me is their connection to the natural world. You know, it's clear that most of us in the Western world have kind of unwilded our bodies. So, working with the Hadza, you start to realize how connected they are to the microbial community that they live in basically. Connected to the animals, and the water, and the plants, and their literally covered in soil and feces if you will of, of everything around them and so, what's that stems for me is really driven home the idea that we are too clean and and maybe sanitation while it's a good thing, maybe we've taken it a little bit too far as well. And so the, from a dietary standpoint, from an evolutionary perspective, the thing that really strikes me about the Hadza, is the tremendous consumption of dietary fiber. Yeah, another thing that's striking about working with the Hadza is that [COUGH] it's, it's very clear as if you watch them move about their day, that they have a connection with the microbial world through the animals and plants in a way that we no longer have. I think, I'm going to get it wrong, but I think the average Westerner, or Americans spends 90% of their time in a house, a car, an office building, whereas Hadza is spend 100% of their time outside. So, when we wall ourselves off from the natural world like we've done in the west with windows, and automobiles, and office buildings we've walled off that community that we've become dependant upon, to maintain the diversity of bacteria that the Hadza still enjoy. So one of the things I've been doing over the last year with with, with American, last year and a half with American Gut is I've been sampling myself a lot. And one of the thing is that because I have access to samples, one of the things that I've or analysis of those samples, one thing I'm able to do is change my diet on a weekly basis I can go with a high fat diet, a low fat diet I can pull in and pull out dietary fiber. And one thing that I learned very quickly is that I can shift my gut microbiota in a very short period of time. And that's not by tweaking whether I eat two bananas in a day one one banana, but it's it's huge fluctuations in fat and dietary fiber and the single macronutrient that seems to have the greatest impact on my personal microbiota, is dietary fiber. And if the source of dietary fiber is important as well, whether I get it from things like leaks, or tomatoes, or iceberg lettuce, which is mainly water, or if I get it from whole grains. So, I've been able to tweak my microbiota to in a way that I never thought was possible by playing around with my diet. Which direction I want to push it, I don't have a clue yet, but I think I'm getting a little closer to understanding that I am in control, of my microbiota to some extent and that I can, by working with the Hudza as well, and I know this from the data that we have, that I can start to rewild. My gut microbiota by just making some small changes to my lifestyle, I don't have to move to Hadzaland to do that, but maybe I can open a window at my house, or maybe spend a little bit more time outside, or have an animal and that will become important if I, if I decide to have more children in the future as well, it'll become very important to them. So one of the other things that, that became clear when I started working with the Hadza, I can go from the United States and I could come to Hadza land, and I could live in the Hadza environment, and I could change my skin microbiota, and I could change my gut to a certain extent. So living in Hadza land, but still eating pasta and drinking scotch, I can change my microbiota only so much. But I also went out and I went on the Hadza diet for a period time as well, eating baobab fruit, eating animals and drinking their water as well, and then I could change my microbiota even more. But the question of whether or not could I take my western gut and make it look like an ancestral Hadza gut. It's going to take a while to figure out, so I thought I would speed that process up and actually do a fecal transplant with a Hadza hunter-gatherer. So, sometime in the very near future, I'm going to figure out who I can do that with after we've completely tested them for anything that might be bad, and it's not a given that we'll solve or see everything in there. But if I can take the Hadza fecal transplant and my immune system doesn't reject it and knock me on the ground. Then the question will become if I can acquire that diversity of bacteria from the Hadza if I go back to the United States and live my Western lifestyle, and I change my microbiota again when I come back to Africa and go on the Hadza diet can I get that same composition to come back? And if I don't, the question is, those mass extinctions, or whatever dropped out is basically the epidemiological windows that we've all passed through. So I can reconstruct the last 10 to 20,000 years of human evolution, when its brought us through agriculture, and pastoralism, and sanitation, and antibiotics. By taking this pods of microbiota and, and basically re, re, kind of restoring my ecosystem, and if I can get those extensions that happen, I think it'll be very informative.

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